


do not consign me to the waves just yet

by surgicalstainless



Series: tidal [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: AU, But mostly angst, Character Study, Chuck Lives, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Raleigh has good ideas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 18:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/surgicalstainless/pseuds/surgicalstainless
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four things Mako Mori lost to the sea.</p><p>(And one thing she isn't ready to let it have, just yet.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	do not consign me to the waves just yet

 

Mako Mori does not remember the first time she saw the sea. She was born on an island; the ocean was never far away. The ocean gives, she was taught, and the ocean takes.

The ocean took three things from Mako Mori on the day of Operation Pitfall. 

Four, if you were counting carefully, but Mako was not ready to settle the accounts just yet. 

 

***

 

Mako does remember the first time she saw the sea as a thing to be feared. She had been disheveled, tear-streaked, wrapped in a shock blanket next to a huge man in a black suit of armor. They were riding in a helicopter, and as they rose toward the horizon, the ocean came into view.

This ocean was gray-blue. Its surface was a hundred thousand tongues that licked a jagged, toothy shoreline. The waves that reached toward them were capped in awful Kaiju Blue, and Mako resisted the urge to draw up her feet. Something had come from those depths and taken her parents.

The flight had been a short one and Mako did not remember much of it. The man talked to her, but her English was not good, and she did not know the words she needed: purpose, imperative,  _vengeance_. She set her socked foot onto her first Shatterdome, and the rotors' downwash straightened her spine, propelled her forward. Vengeance had been a following wind ever since.

Purpose like a wind at her back had driven her to learn to fight, to study engineering, to be the best weapon she could be. Purpose held her up when she grew tired, gave her speed when she was slow. Purpose whetted and honed her: she was the daughter of a swordmaker and she made herself a blade.

...Until Operation Pitfall. Mako had fought on the bottom of the sea and surfaced to a world becalmed. Imperative, that old persistent gale, did not even stir the damp hairs at the nape of her neck. 

“What should I do now?” she asked herself, and for the first time in her life, Mako did not know the answer.

***

A helicopter plucked them from the ocean like fish on a line.  

Once more, Mako found herself wrapped in a shock blanket, next to a man in black armor. 

The man was not her Sensei.

Back at the Shatterdome, people turned to Mako with awful looks of chagrin. They were happy, she knew; the world had been saved. Yet she had lost her father, and they did not know how to behave around her.

She could have explained it to them. She could have told them she was both happy and heartbroken, that it was possible to weep and laugh with two sides of the same face — but she was listless, and merely did not stay.

Mako borrowed Max for long walks down empty, echoing hallways. The new Marshall and the dog were certainly two sides of the same face, Mako reflected. Ranger Hansen was red-eyed and hopeless; his son's grinning dog had not yet learned to lose his faith. Mako took a selfish comfort in Max's simple happiness while it lasted.

Her Sensei had not been a man of faith. He had believed, instead, in himself, in his own hands, and mind, and the power of his will to make things happen. The strength of his convictions made him massive, made him a fixed point for those around him, a steady landmark for steering by. His will had kept them fighting when the world had turned away. His mind had authored the plan to save the world regardless; his hands had guarded their path to the Breach to ensure it could be done.

Mako was, as in all things, an apt disciple.

She knew, therefore, that this — his daughter walking empty halls while the party bubbled on elsewhere — this, too, had been part of the plan. Sensei's strength of will was formidable, but his strength of body was failing.

Above all else, Stacker Pentecost had wanted to die in a jaeger.

This was why Mako was able to sorrow and celebrate with two sides of her face. This was why she wandered the halls, far from stricken eyes: the Marshall's last plan had gone  _right_ , and moment to moment, Mako could not decide how she felt about that. 

A sudden clatter of feet; Max turned, in case this was a friend, and Mako ducked her head away for the same reason. The feet belonged to Tendo Choi, his suspenders askew and an open bottle in his hand. They did not match the expression on his face, which was one of tense and terrified hope —

“LOCCENT caught a fragment of a signal. It was on the right frequency, the encryption was ours... It's possible another pod made it out of the Breach.”

He ran on, desperate to begin the search, and left Mako behind him, still as a stone. Max whined gently at her feet, but she did not heed him. A sudden storm had erupted in her chest. Every restive emotion squalled for dominance: anger versus sorrow, relief against guilt against joy, giddy swirls of possibility twisted in with dark, lonely eddies of regret. Mako stood there, where Tendo had left her, until the storms of emotion subsided and left her with only one. 

_Hope_.

She shook Max's leash and they began to run.

Above all, Mako Mori hoped that the man in the pod was not Stacker Pentecost. 

***

LOCCENT was in chaos. It had been running a skeleton crew while the Shatterdome partied, and that crew looked harried to distraction as they attempted to manage dozens of people who were both less sober and less helpful than they wished. Mako found Tendo in urgent conversation with the tech at the comms board. She waited until they were finished, then pulled the Chief Tech aside.

“What do you need?”

Tendo pushed a hand through his usually-neat hair. “Uh... Coffee.  _Lotta_  coffee. And, the K-Science dudes. We could use their help modeling. Grab one of the heliopter guys, too. Has anyone told Herc yet? Someone should tell Herc. And can we get some of these people _out of here?!_ ” 

Tendo turned away halfway through his last sentence, shouting at the gathered crowd. “Anyone who doesn't have a job to do, anyone not sober enough to  _do_  their job, leave now! Out!” He repeated himself once in Cantonese, and gradually the room began to quiet. Mako delegated responsible, sober-looking individuals to fetch Tendo's requested coffee, K-Science dudes and helicopter guys. She and Max set out to find Marshall Hansen themselves.

When they found him, slumped on the floor of his bunk, the look on his face made it clear he had already heard the news. The Marshall seemed to be on the very precipice of tears, as if he, too, were experiencing a storm in his chest. Mako handed him Max's leash and sat beside him, patient, until the storm abated. 

LOCCENT was calmer, once they returned so the Marshall could be briefed. Small knots of people buzzed and milled around the workstations; maps, charts, graphs were pinned haphazardly on all the walls. Comms techs checked and rechecked their frequencies, in hope of further transmissions. Others broke down every last detail of the signal they had received. It was fragmentary, corrupted, as if the last burst of noise sent out by a dying transceiver. It did not tell them much.

Elsewhere in the room, Dr Gottlieb had abandoned kaiju algorithms for wind patterns and charts of ocean currents. Beside him, Dr. Geiszler searched for data on underwater nuclear blast patterns and toxicity indices. Their bickering was low-pitched and subdued. Tendo and the helicopter pilot pored over maps marked up with flight times and fuel calculations. There was not time to be precise; the pilots would take what the techs knew, and what the scientists calculated, and begin a visual search.

Until then, there were no answers at all.

Mako Mori was not accustomed to feeling useless. “One of our brightest,” Sensei had called her, and he did not boast. She was nineteen, and one of the world's foremost experts on mechatronic engineering. Her mind could design a colossal machine down to its most intricate parts. Her hands could build such a weapon from ruins, make it better than before. Her force of will brought it to life, gave it purpose. Here, though, Mako was of no use. She could not find a tiny, broken pod in the cold, open sea.

Mako returned to her bunk to wait for news, and found Raleigh Becket sitting on the steps outside her door. His eyes were soft, as they always were when they fell on her. 

“I didn't think you'd want to be alone,” he said, and stood while she unlocked the heavy door and felt for the light switch. He was right, of course. He always seemed to know. Mako wondered if this was an effect of Drifting, or if it was unique to Raleigh Becket. She did not ask; she merely stepped aside to let him in.

Raleigh moved to the center of the small space and stopped to take everything in. Her bunk was a mirror image of his own, but in the months since their relocation to Hong Kong, Mako had done her best to make it home. She had installed shelves for best-loved and most-used books, and for small, beautiful things carefully brought from one 'Dome to the next. She had framed and hung woodblock prints, jaeger schematics, family photographs and calligraphy, each to her as beautiful as the others. A treasured pair of her father's swords adorned the wall, art and weapon both. Her space was neat, colorful, and snug. She always felt better, just stepping in the door.

While Raleigh continued to turn and look, Mako set about the familiar motions of making tea. Ritual and warm drink, those great comforters — this was a lesson she had learned from both her cultures. She left Raleigh the only chair and sat on the edge of her bed, breathed in the fragrant steam, waited for something 

“Nothing can continue now the same,” she was surprised to hear herself say, as Raleigh finally sat down. She had not thought it would be so, but her and Raleigh's actions had changed the world, on every level of scale. They had made a paradigm shift; Mako could not find a new bearing. Always she had been driven forward by the wind at her back, without consideration for this moment, the one when all debts were paid.

Raleigh merely nodded, as if he knew — perhaps he did — and sipped his tea. The silence between them felt like nothing so much as a restful pause.

No one came knocking with news, good or bad. When the hour was suitably late, Mako changed and climbed into bed. Raleigh kicked off his boots and joined her, his warmth a comforting ballast at her shoulder. This had been the longest day of her life, Mako thought; she felt leaden, yet somehow unable to sink into sleep. She listened to Raleigh breathe, a slow and even tide, until the waves pulled her under at last.

No news, still, with the morning. Mako woke before Raleigh and lay, waiting for a knock that did not come. Her little bunk seemed airless, inert. She felt a desperate urge to move, to be busy; action was a comfortable habit and a comforting one. Mako rolled lightly out of bed, pulled on a sweatshirt and took her boots into the hall. 

The halls were quiet. It was early, yet, and all those sleepless or sleeping were elsewhere. LOCCENT twitched with activity, but those working looked worn-down with exhaustion and lack of success. Mako saw Marshall Hansen hunched in a corner, Max curled up at his feet. Herc was quite clearly the most exhausted of them all. The man appeared too tired to stay, too afraid to leave. Mako knelt beside him and took the leash from his hands.

“May Max and I escort you to your quarters, Marshall?” She kept her voice soft and her tone polite, but Mako gripped the man's arm as she spoke. She pulled him up and toward the door, and Herc sighed and did not resist. “I will walk Max and see that he is cared for. You should attempt some rest.” If he could, she thought to herself. We are all hung up on tenterhooks. She left her hand on the Marshall's arm as they walked.

Mako moved through the morning as if by rote: see the Marshall to his closing door. Walk the halls. Pace the edges of the helicopter tarmac, skirt the busy idleness of the techs there, waiting just as she was. Pause a moment on the overlook by the jaeger bay doors, gaze down onto the sea. To Mako it always looked hungry, the way the waves slavered incessantly at everything in reach.  _Did something not agree with you?_  She asked it, silently.  _Did you chew something up and spit it back out?_  

_Will we find it in time?_

Raleigh found Max and Mako in the cafeteria. Only one of them was eating; the other picked at her slice of toast. Raleigh looked sleepy but ill-rested, to Mako's eye. He worried about her. For him, she forced a small half-smile and a bite of toast. She watched as Raleigh  fought his own battle with toast and coffee, then followed him when he rose to leave. In the absence of a tailwind of her own, Mako could be happy to drift in Raleigh's eddies for a while.

They made their way to the kwoon. Max looked around for his master, but he had been well-trained and he knew to sit politely. Raleigh pulled off his boots and shrugged out of his sweatshirt, then turned to make sure Mako did the same. His expression was tentative, entreating. “The exercise will help keep your mind off everything,” he explained to her, as if he expected her to turn and leave. “And a workout will do us good. I know I feel pretty sore from yesterday.”

With a shock, Mako saw that there were angry red burns tracing Raleigh's right arm. They glowed in mirrored contrast to the tan drivesuit scars on his left, a hot pattern of brands from Raiju's bite on the way to the Breach. 

“Why did you not say anything? You need treatment! We should go to Medical immediately!” She crossed over to Raleigh barefoot on the mat, her hand ghosting over the injuries but afraid to touch. 

Under her scrutiny, Raleigh shifted, uneasy, moving his weight to the left. Mako was prepared to stake there would be burns on his right leg, too, thanks to Scunner. She had never seen fresh drivesuit burns before; they looked very painful.

“They're not that bad. A nasty sunburn, is all. I've had worse. And none of the burns have blistered or broken the skin, so there's not much Medical can do. It'll feel good to get moving. Thank goodness for updated drivesuits, huh?” He finished his speech with a rueful grin, and held out a staff for her with what seemed like ill-founded optimism. 

Mako discovered she was angry. She was angry at Raleigh for hiding his injuries, but she was furious at herself for not noticing. Gipsy had lost her right arm and much of her right leg in the scramble for the Breach — of course her copilot would not be unscathed! She had seen the scars that kind of damage caused, on her father and Raleigh both. She knew about the nerve damage, the neuropathy, lasting injuries not visible to the eye. How could she have been so thoughtless?

All the while Mako berated herself, Raleigh remained standing with the staff extended, although his face grew more and more uncertain as he watched hers. She realized her eyes were swimming, and reached up with one hand to knuckle the wetness away. With her other hand, she snatched the staff before Raleigh could pull it back. 

“They are tears of rage,” she informed him, and attacked.

She was overset with emotion and he was stiff and slow. Their fighting was not the smooth dance it had been the last time they had sparred, just a few days ago. “Control,” her Sensei would have said, and as ever, he would have been right. Fury loaned her the first few touches, and then burned out, leaving her leaden and empty as before. She had no following wind to lend momentum, no imperative demanding she excel — Mako lost the match, to see how it felt. 

She lost the second one, too, and the third, and could not find it in her to care. By the fourth round, though, Raleigh was not able to hide his discomfort. Mako took his staff from him, not very gently, and shoved him toward his boots. 

“Go,” she told him. “Shower, care for your wounds.” She turned to the door, clicking for Max. “I will see if there is news.” Though she did not look, she felt Raleigh's eyes on her back as she retreated down the hall.

In LOCCENT, the atmosphere was subdued. Still no news, Tendo told her with a shake of his head, and it was obvious to Mako that they were running out of time. The escape pods were not designed for prolonged occupancy. Exposure to the elements was a concern, in addition to radiation, and any trauma sustained in battle. Mako wondered silently how long they would continue to search, then upbraided herself for such pessimism. Of course they must hold out hope.

Mako handed Max to Tendo and left the control center. She was useless there, and in need of a shower. She made to head down the hallway that led to her bunk — a scuffle from the room behind her. Something in the tone of the pilot's voice on the radio, though Mako could not catch the words. Slow, cautious, she turned back. Tendo was hunched desperately over the microphone, as if trying to get that small measure closer to the voice on the other end.

“— pod sighted,” it was saying, “appears intact. Approaching now for a closer look.”

There was a pause, in which no one dared breathe, move or speak. Much too much later, the radio scratched back into life. 

“I'm now hovering above the pod. It's one of ours, it looks beat to hell but in one piece. The hatch is cracked ajar but still sitting mostly in place. Checking with binoculars...”

“It's the number two pod from Striker Eureka, LOCCENT. Our medics are rappelling down now to ascertain the status of the occupant.” 

A ripple went through the listening crowd, but of what Mako was not sure. There was a crowd now, Mako noticed. Someone must have sent the message out. Every available space was filling as breathless Shatterdome staffers filtered in to hear the news. Someone bumped her shoulder; it was Raleigh, his hair dripping and the same sweaty shirt pulled back on. She looked up at him, not really focusing, and whatever he saw in her face made him take her hand.  

The silence from the radio stretched on and on. Mako felt like she couldn't get a breath, like she was drowning right then and there. She concentrated on the warmth of Raleigh's fingers around hers, and squeezed his hand tightly.  _I am glad you are here_ , the squeeze said. He squeezed back: _I know_.

People shifted beside them, made a path for Herc Hansen to push through. He was halfway to the comms desk when the radio crackled again. 

“LOCCENT, our medics report that Ranger Hansen is unconscious but alive.” The assembled crowd made a sound that was part gasp, part cheer, part sigh. “— vital signs are  _not_  stable. We are securing the pod for transport and will return to base with all speed. Request full medical team standing by for our arrival.”

The room erupted. Herc Hansen collapsed into the nearest hastily-vacated chair and put his face in his hands. Max barked, not understanding the celebration but happy to join in. All around, people hugged, smiled and cried. Mako felt her knees go weak from the shock. She was saved from a collapse of her own by Raleigh Becket, steady as ever at her side. He pulled her into a hug that was part celebration, part something else entirely. 

Mako leaned her forehead against Raleigh's shoulder and let the tumult wash over her. She had thought the world knocked unrecognizably askew, but here was a bearing safe enough.  

_Two_  fixed points on her horizon, Mako thought. One old, and one new. Raleigh's breath on the nape of her neck felt a little like the stirrings of a following wind.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Oh noes! A (sort of) cliffhanger! Never fear! This installment is directly followed by a sequel, which will be posted as soon as I can think of a better title than "Do not consign me to the waves just yet, Part 2."
> 
> You are of course encouraged to come visit me on [tumblr](http://z-delenda-est.tumblr.com). I have no idea what I'm doing, but more friends are always better. And I really like prompts.


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